J. G. Ballard Quotes

We’re on the moon,” Sadie murmured. “El Paso, Texas,” Bast corrected.

Walking on the moon is now something that people used to do, in the distant past, like macramé, decoupage and the Hustle.... There will just be the pictures, then, as we saw them in the summer of '69, ghostly and blurry, colorless and incomprehensible, an infant's glimpse of a new world.

Everybody knows what the moon is, everybody knows what this decade is, and everybody can tell a live astronaut who returned from the moon from one who didn't

We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.

Frequently on the lunar surface I said to myself, 'This is the Moon, that is the Earth. I'm really here, I'm really here!'

I expected the unexpected and went [on the Moon] with an open mind. I think the visual scene was described by my words on first landing - "magnificent desolation." Magnificent for the achievement of being there, and desolate for the eons of lifelessness.

Walking around on the moon was significantly easier than we'd thought it would be. There weren't any balance problems, so you weren't tumbling over.

I can remember walking on the moon.

I'm quite disappointed that I'm still the last man on the moon.

I remember it was hard to believe that I was taking a step onto the lunar surface.

On Earth, I weighed 150 pounds; my suit and backpack weighed another 150. 300 pounds. Up there, I weighed only 50. So I could prance around on my toes. It was quite easy to do.

The exciting part for me, as a pilot, was the landing on the moon. That was the time that we had achieved the national goal of putting Americans on the moon. The landing approach was, by far, the most difficult and challenging part of the flight. Walking on the lunar surface was very interesting, but it was something we looked on as reasonably safe and predictable. So the feeling of elation accompanied the landing rather than the walking.

You can't land on the moon and say, "Ooh, it's all sticky! It's covered in jam!

When I first looked back at the Earth, standing on the Moon I cried

One day I would love to do rock a gig on the moon - how rad would that be? Isn't Richard Branson flying planes to outer space? Motley Crue could be the first band to play on the moon.

Neil Armstrong, when he was out there landing on the moon, I was there first.

I was only 8 years old on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong, 38-year-old commander of 'Apollo 11,' descended the cramped lunar module Eagle's ladder with hefty backpack and bulky spacesuit to become the first human on the moon.

The only time I had what you would call life-threatening fear was when I was on the Moon. Towards the end of our stay, we got excited and we were going to do the high jump, and I jumped and fell over backwards. That was a scary time, because if the backpack got broken, I would have had it. But everything held together.

I remember; I was 15 years old when Neil Armstrong put feet in the moon.

If you remember back to some of the television we saw, Buzz and Neil on the Moon with Apollo 11. Black and white. They were bouncing around a lot. They were really bouncing on their tip toes. Quite fun to do.

I had the good fortune and the gift to be one of the 12 men to walk on the moon.

The successful landing on the moon, very probably, is the best story.

The moon's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

I think after orbiting for a while and looking at the surface, I think the natural tendency is to want to experience it, to go down there and touch it. I started thinking about the Apollo astronauts who orbited the moon and didn't land - that must have been agonizing!

What fiction could match - in drama or suspense - man's first walk on the Moon?